The economics of Swifties

I think there may be some points about Taylor Swift that you’re underestimating.

As of 2015, when you compare her to Adele, Ariana Grande, Megan Trainor, and Katy Perry, she had released four albums to Adele’s two. Swift outsold Adele (her top-selling album outperforming Adele’s) and her albums had received nearly twice as many Grammy nominations, though Adele had won more Grammys. The other two artists were in a very different league.

As to innovation, given that Swift started as a country-music star, the question of innovation depends a little on how you define her field. If you consider her a pop musician, then she’s minimally innovative. If you consider her a country musician (which she was for her first few albums), then while she displayed little “frontier innovation,” she was skilled at Graham Parsons-style catch-up innovation directed toward the pop mainstream: bringing in to her music things that country had hitherto considered “other” while still maintaining her base. In Parson’s case, he brought in aspects of late 1960s guitar rock; in Swift’s, it was programmed beats.

BigHank53 @1‘s point about love songs and breakup songs is key to Swift’s success. Swift, upon becoming an adult two years into her professional career, managed to walk a line that was very challenging for music and movie stars in the “Girl Boss” era: she maintained a wholesome image while having a reputation for dating and breaking up with a lot of men who were themselves famous; the approach of each album release date fueled speculation of how she would “dish” on her latest exes, and the albums, for her fans, followed through not just on the storytelling, but on the expectations for musicianship.

That first decade also saw her able to capitalize, perhaps inadvertently given what we’ve later learned about her politics, on what was then her apolitical appearance. At a time when R&B and rap were increasingly dominating the American and British charts, and rock was falling back, she was a white star in a historically white genre who sold well and won awards. Kanye West’s stage-mounting at the MTV Video Music Awards, when he said that his girlfriend Beyoncé should have won the award given to Swift (Swift’s song was “You Belong With Me”; Beyoncé’s was “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)”). In the long run, Swift and Beyoncé have become the two leading female vocalists of the first part of this century and seem to get along. But in 2009, for people who wanted to take side in a culture clash (Swift’s youth v. West’s middle age, Swift and Beyoncé’s feminism versus West’s chauvinism, or the race card), that possibility was open to them.

All told, I’m inclined to see 2021’s re-recording as a consolidation move rather than a turbocharging. The purchasing power of Swift’s fan base, the “Swifties,” was what she was betting on, and it came through. The fact that Swift’s fan base has, almost since the beginning, included both teenaged girls and their mothers (who never found anything objectionable in her music, unlike most youth pop music since at least the days of ragtime) may have increased the extent to which she was uniquely able to bank on people paying for full physical albums and increasingly pricy ticket sales at a time of middle- and lower-class economic stagnation, even though the rise of streaming was hollowing out the music industry as a whole.

To bring it back to the question of innovation, it really depends: I struggle to think of another artist as productive as she is who has established the “sell to both girls and their mothers” model and maintained it across two generations of girls. And her ability to first integrate pop (and related, more or less modified R&B stylings) sounds into her country repertoire before going fully pop, without losing her initial country fanbase was a hallmarks of “catch-up through diffusion” as the economists have had it since the 1960s: it’s innovation to the people doing it and the market they serve, even if it’s not new to the world as a whole, and far from avant-garde.

Well, yeeees.

“From the beginnings of rock-and-roll in the 1950s, through heavy metal and psychedelia to rap in the 1970s, radical innovation was the norm. Since the 1980s, new styles have mostly been hybrids and recombinations (acid house , dubstep and so on) or attempts at returning to rock purity (grunge and, before that, punk).

Drawing a long bow, I’d link to this to the decline of the teenager as a central category in music and culture generally.”

Over the same time period there was a massive change in the technology of instruments and recording. I’m unconvinced you could have made Machine Head on the kit the Beatles were using in Hamburg nor Bohemian Rhapsody in the studio used to record She Loves Me (possibly no great loss on either but tastes, do, differ). Some of the novelty thus being exploration of what could be newly done, exploration of the possibility space.

Only some of it perhaps. Which then rather stops when 24 track everywhere and decent synths mean everyone’s got access to pretty much everything and the new boundaries return to the notes and words again rather than the effects possible.

A bit. Maybe?

unlike [Elvis, Dylan, The Beatles and Michael Jackson], she’s not a radical innovator. That’s not true of Swift alone. From the beginnings of rock-and-roll in the 1950s, through heavy metal and psychedelia to rap in the 1970s, radical innovation was the norm. Since the 1980s, new styles have mostly been hybrids and recombinations (acid house , dubstep and so on) or attempts at returning to rock purity (grunge and, before that, punk).

Reminds me of Charles Mingus’ liner notes for his album Let My Children Hear Music:

Pop music is still another story. Even tune structures are stolen. The music I’ve heard from the late pop groups (many of which are from England) seems to stem from a mixture of many different American composers and American music. ” I Found A New Baby.” “Nature Boy.” “Ain’t Necessarily So.” I hear these tunes, certain tunes, all through The Beatles’ music, for instance. I don’t know if they just surround themselves with this kind of music and compose from it. [. . .]

I think it is evident when a person is stealing or copying a form of music which is not his own. Other musicians recognize it, but I don’t think it is important enough to them to say anything about it. Why, at least, doesn’t the public, or don’t the critics point it out? I heard a lot of Bird’s solos in the music of this past and present rock music era. The names are not important. But what they do, more or less, is just take a melody created by a jazz soloist and put words to it. They add words to a solo with a few of the notes left out. That is what it sounds like to me and others I’ve discussed it with.

I want to be clear, I like that Elvis showed white Americans that they could enjoy music played in close imitation to the way the most popular black artists did; then the Beatles did the same in Britain and the US, too. Dylan showed folk-music fans that a song played on an electric guitar was not bad by reason of the instrumentation. Keith Richard sought to emulate the overdriven sound of Sister Rosetta Thorpe’s guitar amp—and there’s a straight line from there to Rush’s “Metalhead,” cited by Tim Worstall @5, above.

With the exception of Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, and some pieces by King Crimson and their scene, that old time rock’n’roll was not as innovative as its partisans may like to recall it being, even if Mingus’ words are more than a little harsh.

And that means that the limited originality of Swift’s music isn’t actually as different from that shown by pop in the last century’s third quarter as some of her critics may like to believe.

“how did Swift become the cultural and economic phenomenon she is now?”

It’s not real music? The explanation is much more similar to “why does McDonalds sell so many hamburgers” than “why is Mahler or Charlie Parker” revered. The race is not to the swift etc…

Another factor is the production values. If you look at the album credits, not only does it have a long list of musicians and songwriters; the producers are also numerous. I liken this to the 1930s Hollywood movie factory way of making art. And like others have said, she does put on a SHOW for her fans.

Sorry for the uniform bold on my last comment. Ah, html tag editing.

John @11: whole books have indeed been written on the topic: Stuart Nicholson’s Jazz–Rock;Matt Brennan’s When Genres Collide; and Mike Smith’s In With the In Crowd, the latter of which talks in part about how popular black musics that didn’t enter the payola game in the 1950s and 60s didn’t chart until the digitization of sales records in the 1980s, and how this enabled jazz’ avant-garde to claim a definitional mantle within their genre that the Zappas and King Crimsons never were able to claim in rock.

But ultimately, the question of what became popular is distinct from the question of what was innovative, except insofar as the popular is a story of the “catch-up innovation” that I discussed in my first comment. I’m with you that rock became more popular by mixing into itself innovations that were performed elsewhere. This is also what Swift did. Neither is frontier innovation, and therefore classic rock doesn’t hold any particular innovation edge over, say, the music of Taylor Swift.

I think it’s because jazz sounds like freedom, whereas rock and its generic offspring (mostly) sound like the stupefying conformity we’re all forced to live under. Taylor Swift takes this to another level.

Her songs could have been written by an AI but she promotes Dem-friendly messages while looking like a Fox News anchor or Trump press sec so the West-Wing-watching classes lap it up and she’s laughing all the way to the investment bank.

And I’m sick of hearing reading Guardian editorials about her wedding dress.

Re: “Before the 1950s, the word ‘teenager’ was almost unknown.” You’re off by a decade, I’d say. In the 1940s, teenagers became widely acknowledged as a demographic, consumer, and cultural category in the U.S., thanks in no small part to the teen mania stirred up by another pop icon, Frank Sinatra.

I certainly don’t mean to disparage rock. I don’t follow it, but I consider it a respectable genre. I used to enjoy John Peel’s program on the BBC World Service, and there have been some great bands in recent times, like Dire Straits, Tears for Fears, Radiohead, etc. This performance by Gorillaz is beautiful and impressive; would it be considered rock of some sort? I would say it’s definitely innovative, and relatively recent, and I’m sure it’s a popular band, just not popular like Taylor Swift. But musically it’s definitely better. And Yukimi Nagano is a much more interesting singer in my opinion. My impression is that music like this does not make it on to the pop charts these days, and that was my point. I would guess that in the old days it would have.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2x6bWw2J0po

your comments read as if your opinions were formed before 1956 (my birth year, and significant in other ways)

Ellington at Newport?

If you want to post something non-snarky about your intellectual formation, I’d be interested.

As the ‘nym suggests I’m just a good old-fashioned Marxist who was radicalised working a boring capitalist job (a geriatric millennial in temporal terms). And I think Adorno was right about most cultural matters other than jazz.

Dire Straits make Taylor Swift look like a boundary-pushing genius of musical invention.

engels @26:

Be nice, now. I was a grown-up before I found out that Supertramp and Dire Straits were two different bands. They were both so very technically proficient. So put together. And their lawyers always gave co-writing credits to the other artists whose licks their singles lifted, often even before being asked.

teenagers aren’t lying around in their rooms listening to albums and mixtapes or reading NME than they are e.g. gaming and watching their favourite streamers

Thanks to the internet, sex, drugs and rock and roll has been replaced by pronouns, anti-depressants and ragebait.

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